Johann Benjamin Gross (1809-1848) was principal cellist at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and played in the imperial orchestra in St. Petersburg from 1837. Until recently, the works of this contemporary of Mendelssohn and Schumann were almost completely forgotten. The writing virtuoso dedicated the majority of his compositions to his own instrument, but he also wrote several string quartets, as he was the chamber music partner of the famous Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps in Russia.

Pan-Verlag has published several works by Gross for the first time. Three editions in particular should be mentioned here:

• The three-movement Sonata in C major for two cellos moves within the 1st and 5th registers, whereby the composer skillfully exploits the tonal possibilities of the limited range. Thanks to the easy technical demands, the work is well suited for teaching purposes. One small drawback to this first edition: it contains two individual parts, but no score.

• The Capriccio op. 6 (Pan 1602) on a theme from Étienne-Nicolas Méhul's opera Joseph in Egypt for violoncello and bass is an effective virtuoso piece whose variation form corresponds to the zeitgeist of early Romanticism. While the solo part demands brilliant bowing technique and secure (thumb) position playing, the bass part is assigned a purely accompanying function.
• The Sonata in B minor op. 7 for cello and piano (Pan 1603) is stylistically close to Mendelssohn and represents a significant enrichment of the duo repertoire from the first half of the 19th century. Together with songs and the String Quartet in F minor op. 37.3, it has been recorded on the Laborie Records label (performers: Quatuor Mosaïques; Michael Dahmen, baritone; Yoko Kaneko, piano; Christophe Coin, violoncello).

Johann Benjamin Gross: Sonata in C major for 2 violoncellos, edited by Folckert Lüken-Isberner, PAN 1600, € 10.00, Pan, Kassel

id.: Capriccio op. 6 for violoncello and bass, PAN 1602, € 16.00

id.: Sonata in B minor op. 7 for violoncello and piano, PAN 1603, € 19.00

"Carl Czerny was perhaps the greatest pianist who almost never performed and the greatest composer who fell into oblivion," writes Iwo Zaluski in his foreword to the new edition of Czerny's ninth piano sonata. He even counts him alongside Beethoven and Schubert as part of the "great triumvirate" of classical piano sonatas. These statements are of course highly contestable. As far as the "triumvirate" is concerned, Haydn and Mozart should not be passed over so carelessly. And it is also not true that Czerny has been forgotten as a composer. However, it is not necessarily his piano sonatas that come to mind. These would actually deserve more attention.

His ninth in B minor op. 145 has now been reissued by Iwo Zaluski for Doblinger. The formal structure is unusual: six movements, including a free fugue at the end. This is more reminiscent of Beethoven's late string quartets than a classical sonata. The harmonic language is also unusually distinctive in places. The melodic phrases are very expansive, especially in the slow third movement (Adagio molto espressivo) - probably the climax of the work - which is imbued with an almost symphonic breath.
Surprisingly, it is the pianistic development of this music that makes the weakest impression. Although the piano writing is comfortable to play, it suffers from the fact that the many accompanying phrases sound stereotypical and unimaginative.

If you want to experience the composer Czerny "at his best", it is better to go for the four-handed Grande Sonata in F minor op. 178, an unusually passionate and colorful work, entirely in the spirit of the Appassionata of his teacher Beethoven.

Carl Czerny: Sonata No. 9 in B minor op. 145, edited by Iwo Zaluski, Diletto Musicale DM 1470, € 18.95, Doblinger, Vienna 

For those who rub their eyes when looking at this score, let it be said right up front: Yes, it is the composer of Tosca or Turandotand no - the 7 sonatas, 6 versetti and 4 marches published here have little to do with Puccini's style as we know it from the opera stage. As a descendant of a family of musicians who shaped the musical life of the city of Lucca for four generations - his father was a cathedral organist, among other things - Giacomo Puccini certainly came into contact with church music at a very early age, learned to play the organ and made his first public appearance as an organist. From 1872 to 74, he was employed as assistant organist at the cathedral and worked at the church of San Girolamo until 1882. The hitherto unpublished total of 61 organ works, of which Carus presents a selection here, also appear to date from this period; a complete publication seems to be planned in the Puccini Complete Edition.

Even if one still senses little of Puccini's later tonal refinement, with these works he joins a tradition that was shaped by composers such as Vincenzo Petrali or Padre Davide da Bergamo: lively little movements reminiscent of brass music or Rossini operas, short and easy to play throughout, which reveal a confident composer who was already writing with aplomb and here and there even hint at a return to a more "serious" style of church music composition. Incidentally, the Dutch organist Liuwe Tamminga, who works in Bologna, has also released a recording of these works on the Passacaille label (PAS 1029). Thanks to organs that Puccini may have known or played, it gives a good impression of how even music that seems somewhat simple on paper can be orchestrated magnificently on a suitable instrument. A valuable addition to the Italian repertoire, for once by a great and well-known composer, versatile for use in church services and concerts - and guaranteed to be a success!

Giacomo Puccini: Sonata, Versetti, Marce - Selected organ works, edited by Virgilio Bernardoni, CV 18190, € 28.00, Carus, Stuttgart 2018

Well-known melodies from Russian operas, ballets and chamber music of the 19th and 20th centuries (Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich and Khachaturian) are arranged here for two violin parts of medium difficulty. The melodic material and the accompaniment are divided between the two players.

The fingerings in the duo score need to be improved or supplemented in some places. It is very motivating to play these stimulating pieces, which in turn encourages the will to meet the technical requirements (chromatic sequences, rhythmic interplay, harmonics, pizzicato).

David Brooker: Classical Favourites from Russia, arr. for two violins, UE 36749, € 16.95, Universal Edition Vienna 2017

Spectacular things are sometimes quite inconspicuous. The plain orange cover has no photo. You will search in vain for the names of the soloists. Conductor Rudolf Lutz and his orchestra from the J.S. Bach Foundation St. Gallen, which plays on period instruments, are all about the matter in hand - a complete performance of Bach's vocal works over a period of 25 years, including audio and video recordings (see Sswiss music newspaper 9/2009, p. 14 f.).

Musically, the twentieth CD of this ambitious project is a great success. The clarity of the text is excellent throughout. The choir of the J.S. Bach Foundation shines with agility and transparency, while the soloists impress with their clever phrasing and many tonal colors. In the cantata BWV 96 Lord Christ, the one and only Son of God special guest Maurice Steger draws elaborate lines on the sopranino recorder. The fast opening chorus is light-footed and dance-like. The lying notes in the orchestra are lively, the articulation is always eloquent. Jan Börner's alto is just as moving as Noëmi Sohn Nad's limp soprano. And the arias are also in good hands with Hans Jörg Mammel (tenor) and Wolf Matthias Friedrich (bass).

In the light cantata BWV 67 Hold Jesus Christ in remembrance the choir inspires with relaxed coloratura. And when bass Dominik Wörner sings his calm greeting of peace to the troubled souls in the choir and orchestra, the result is great theatricality. In the cantata We should already praise Christ BWV 121 is accentuated by Andreas Holm on the oboe d'amore, while Johannes Kaleschke (tenor) plays the coloratura in the aria O creature exalted by God sparkles. Only the final chorales seem a little breathless in this stimulating interpretation of Bach, which relies on fluid tempi and great agility. But this cannot detract from the excellent overall impression.

This CD is a "family affair" according to the booklet; this family affair has a program that is hinted at in the CD title: Constellations Ardentes - glowing constellations; this title in turn refers to the piece Ori, which the Bernese composer Jean-Luc Darbellay (*1946) wrote in 2007 for his two children Noëlle-Anne (violin, viola, voice) and Olivier (horn). Ori refers to Orion, a constellation whose center of power lies in the star Betelgeuse, a giant star a thousand times the diameter of our sun. The eleven-minute piece is like a gravitational field of sound created by the horn and violin, which orbit each other in alternating movements, shimmering, caressing and contrasting.

For the same performers, the Zurich composer Stefan Wirth (*1975) has written the piece Lunules électriques (2012) was written. In it, Wirth intended less a conversation between violin and horn than connections and fusions of the two instruments in a new sound. For example, the fluttering tongues of the horn are taken up by the tremolos of the violin, and new color combinations are constantly created in the overtone spectrum of the two instruments. Towards the end of the piece, the instruments unite in a chorale-like passage, where the violinist's voice joins the sound of the horn and violin, with a vocalise on "lunules électriques" from Rimbaud's poem Le bateau ivre.

The program is enriched by two romantic trios: the Quatre Petites Pièces by Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) and the Trio op. 40 by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). The four miniatures by Koechlin, a pupil of Fauré, were composed between 1890 and 1909 and are a dreamy, yearning reminder of the scent of the turn of the century. The version for the standard instrumentation, violin, horn and piano, was followed by another with viola instead of violin, and the work has been recorded here in this rarely heard, extraordinarily beautiful version.

The focus of the CD is on Brahms' Opus 40 for piano, violin and French horn. He wrote the thoughtful trio in a mood of deepest mourning over the death of his mother.

The interpretation is a stroke of luck: the two Darbellay siblings are joined by the excellent Swiss pianist Benjamin Engeli, who also comes from a family of musicians. The three of them play together powerfully, subtly and technically flawlessly.

Born in London in 1967, Rebecca Saunders studied with Nigel Osborne in Edinburgh and with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe. Her music stands for "the finest musical gestures and sounds, the exploration of never-before-heard timbres and the spatialization of musical progressions". She has been awarded the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, among others.

Since 2003, a work has been commissioned from a world-renowned composer every two years as part of the "Roche Commissions". Saunders was chosen by Roche at the suggestion of the Lucerne Festival Artistic Director. The world premiere of her work will take place during the 2020 Summer Festival.

The French-Swiss director Georges Gachot has made some remarkable films that bring us very close to the legends of Música Popular Brasileira. He has portrayed Maria Bethânia, Nana Caymmi and Martinho da Vila and in doing so - as in his excellent feature about the otherwise camera-shy pianist Martha Argerich - created an unaffected, intimate closeness to these protagonists that contributes greatly to the understanding of their music. It is precisely this strength that he can use in the film Where are you João Gilberto? cannot play out. This is partly due to the concept of the film itself, but also to the rather dubious artistic significance of the singer who is the subject of the search.

Gachot withholds Gilberto, who is deliberately hiding from the public, from the audience in several ways. Firstly, he only approaches him indirectly by retelling someone else's search: The late German journalist Marc Fischer had failed in his attempt to get close to the bossa nova pioneer and had written a book about it. The film also traces how Gachot tries to follow Fischer's research, which means that two absentees already block direct access to the Gilberto phenomenon. There is actually a third: Gilberto's daughter Bebel, who apparently had contact with her father during the filming, but who also remains a phantom. Thus, for long stretches, all we have to do is follow travel banalities, phone calls that lead nowhere, conversations that produce no results, even with Gilberto's ex-wife Miúcha. We learn a little - too little - about the bossa nova culture from episodic encounters with greats of the style, above all Marcos Valle and Roberto Menescal, in which the music itself is sometimes - also too little - mentioned.

One would accept all this if João Gilberto's game of hide-and-seek actually had a deeper aesthetic meaning that would shed light on a highly fruitful era in Brazilian music history. Although João Gilberto is considered one of the fathers of bossa nova, the style was decisively influenced by others, in particular Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes as well as Marcos Valle, Roberto Menescal, Carlos Lyra and Edu Lobo, among many others. In today's Brazil itself, we dare say, João Gilberto is by no means held in the same esteem that he enjoys among the ageing, educated middle-class European jazz and world music audience. Most Brazilians probably couldn't care less where and why he is presumably holed up in a hotel room in Rio.

This search for Gilberto is particularly irritating in view of Brazil's current highly explosive political and artistic situation, and seems like a kind of denial of reality: While everything seems to be going downhill in the country, Gachot bites into an irrelevant side aspect of a golden era of Música Popular Brasileira that has long since passed. Where are you João Gilberto? becomes a well-made, at times atmospheric nostalgia flick - but with the wrong theme at the wrong time.
 

The German Music Council supports an appeal by the State Music Councils of North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, as well as the Cultural Council of North Rhine-Westphalia, calling on the Members of the European Parliament to approve the planned EU directive on copyright in the digital single market.

In its vote on July 5, the European Parliament voted by a narrow majority against the negotiating mandate proposed by the Legal Affairs Committee on the planned EU directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. The Parliament's position is now to be discussed and voted on again at the next plenary session. Negotiations with the EU Commission and the European Council can only begin once Parliament has approved the draft.
 

The prize is organized by the newly founded Verein zur Förderung der Klassischen Musik e.V. (Association for the Promotion of Classical Music). The founding members are the Association of Classical Independents in Germany, Deutsche Grammophon, Konzertdirektion Dr. Rudolf Goette, Dagmar Sikorski, Sony Music, Benedikt Stampa and the Warner Music Group. The award ceremony will be broadcast by media partner ZDF on October 14 at 10 pm. 

The association was founded after the organizer of the Echo, the German Music Industry Association (BVMI), announced the end of all Echo awards in the pop, classical and jazz categories. While the rules and jury of the new award are still based on those of the Echo Klassik in this transitional year, the association aims to continuously develop the new award for classical music based on feedback from the industry.

In addition to the acoustically high-quality rehearsal room in the former church hall of the First Church of Christ Scientist Basel, the new building offers opportunities for workshops and educational programs. The premises are not intended for concert performances. In addition, the offices of the SOB will also be located in the same building. The new rehearsal house can be used by other orchestras in addition to the SOB. The SOB will be responsible for subletting and managing the space in future.

The renovation is scheduled for completion at the end of 2019. This will allow the Basel Symphony Orchestra to begin rehearsals in the new premises together with the office in spring 2020.
 

Ever since Iannis Xenakis created the spatial sound composition Concret PH for 425 loudspeakers and John Cage's random sounds for American art galleries in the 1960s, countless experiments have been carried out with the aim of creating a meaningful relationship between music and architecture. Some with strategic planning such as the Music for a housewhich Stockhausen staged with fourteen assistant composers in Darmstadt in 1968, some rather casually and on an improvisational basis. "Making space acoustically tangible" is the all-encompassing formula. It implies that the composition renounces autonomous laws and tends towards "musique d'ameublement", as Erik Satie once ambiguously put it. The musical performance approaches the sound installation, and for the audience, situational perception takes precedence over structural or semantically related musical listening. In the case of half-baked concepts, this can end in banalities, but it can also lead to enlightening results.

The latter was the case with the sound event that Francesco Hoch performed on the last Saturday in August at a lofty height of 1700 meters above sea level on Monte Generoso. This was not only due to the carefully conceived music, but also to the architectural object to which the composition was functionally tailored: the "Fiore di pietra" (Stone Flower) building by architect Mario Botta. The ambitiously designed new mountain station of the cog railway with panoramic restaurant, exhibition and conference rooms was inaugurated last year and has since attracted excursionists, hikers and architecture enthusiasts from all directions.

In addition to an elevator, the four floors of the spherical building are connected by an artfully angled, daylight-bright staircase that opens up to the usable spaces in a variety of ways and constantly opens up new perspectives both inside and out. This visually and acoustically equally inspiring ambience was now the setting for the Colorazione musicale per il Fiore di pietrathe "musical coloring of the stone flower", as Francesco Hoch called his music. The sound action lasted half an hour and was repeated three times that afternoon.

The eight musicians required for the piece were distributed in pairs across the four floors: the low instruments cello and bassoon at the bottom by the entrance, oboe and piccolo at the top and the "middle" instruments violin, flute, clarinet and cor anglais in between. The staircase is separated from the outer wall on one side by a space around one and a half meters wide, which not only allows a view from top to bottom, but also creates the conditions for the sound to mix easily in the vertical. Thanks to this spatial permeability, the eight voices merged into a common sound sculpture that varies depending on the location. Walking up and down the four floors, you could experience how the horizontal layers of sound alternately came to the fore and then disappeared again in the overall sound, and anyone sitting down in one of the adjacent rooms perceived a kind of static distant sound that was only constantly changing in its inner structure.

The composer had worked out a precise score for the eight performers. As is usual in such spatial sound experiments, the material is simply structured: short melodic phrases, mostly scale components or repetitive patterns that constantly change and form a kaleidoscope-like whole. However, durations and entries are precisely defined in the score, so that the overall course is formally structured; during the performance, coordination across the four floors was ensured by a click track. The half-hour composition is divided into three ten-minute parts according to the A-B-A' pattern. The parts with Petalo (petal), which form the compact frame, differ in their opposing dynamics and density ratios, and in their internal structural progressions they emulate the blossom-like forms of Botta's stone flower. In the three-part large form, the composition could perhaps be compared to a blossom that slowly closes and opens again.

The three performances were followed by a panel discussion that focused neither on musical nor architectural issues, but on shared biographical experiences. The participants were all born in 1943, the same year as Francesco Hoch, and therefore 75 years old: a lawyer, a musician, a writer, a surgeon, a painter and the composer - all from Ticino. The only one missing was Mario Botta, who was currently in St. Petersburg. A generation that was actively involved in shaping the post-war decades from different perspectives and in very different fields looked back in an intelligent and inspiring way.

Francesco Hoch at musinfo.ch